Remember Fort Pillow!

A rendering of the Fort Pillow Massacre from Frank Leslie's Illustrated WeeklyCredit Dickinson College

On April 12, 1864 — the third anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter — a Confederate force led by the brilliant and brutal Nathan Bedford Forrest attacked Union troops holding Fort Pillow, an obscure post in West Tennessee. What happened after Forrest’s men captured Fort Pillow remains one of the most notorious and controversial incidents of the Civil War.

Fort Pillow sat on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, about 40 miles north of Memphis. The Confederates had built it early in the war using slave labor; soon after, Union forces captured it as they poured down from Kentucky. Although the sprawling, isolated base had little military value, it had become something of a mecca for escaped slaves and Northern businessmen, and a hotel, store and contraband village complemented the two miles of outer defenses and crescent-shaped inner fort.

Fort Pillow’s garrison consisted of the 13th Tennessee Cavalry — a battalion of Unionists and rebel deserters — and elements of the Second and Sixth United States Colored Artillery regiments. The fort was thus held by an uneasy combination of white Southerners and black freedmen; although both units included men from the local area, there was some hostility between them. The troops were led by 25-year-old Maj. Lionel F. Booth, a capable career soldier.

In the spring of 1864 several thousand enemy horsemen under Forrest’s command invaded West Tennessee, bent on securing recruits and supplies and disrupting the Union occupation. Over the past three years, Forrest — a wealthy slave trader before the war — had risen from private to major general and become the Confederacy’s most daring and feared cavalry officer. Now he set his sights on Fort Pillow.

Although Forrest and others later claimed that he sought to avenge wrongs inflicted by the fort’s garrison on the local populace, his real motives were more mundane. “There is a Federal force of 500 or 600 at Fort Pillow,” Forrest noted in early April, “which I shall attend to in a day or two, as they have horses and supplies which we need.” The general gathered about 1,500 of his raiders and rode for Pillow, reaching the unsuspecting fort at dawn on April 12.

Forrest’s men approached the fort from several directions, dismounted, and quickly seized the high ground and outer defenses. They set the contraband camp ablaze, sending women and children fleeing. The garrison, meanwhile, retreated to the inner fort. There, nearly perched on the edge of the bluff, Major Booth prepared his men for a last-ditch defense.

The federals were in a difficult position. Booth commanded about 585 men and six cannons, but they faced enemy fire on three sides and had the steep bluff at their back. Rebels in the foliage and buildings surrounding the inner fort sent a constant shower of bullets into the men below, keeping them pinned down behind the walls. Worse still, the Union artillerymen could not raise their guns’ muzzles high enough to target the enemy, and many of their shells failed to explode.

Fort Pillow’s defenders, “both black and white, fought manfully,” a witness recalled. “I saw several negroes wounded, with blood running from their bodies, still engaged loading and firing cannon and muskets cheerfully.” The white Tennesseans, no longer contemptuous of their black comrades, openly admired their bravery.

At 9 a.m., as he strode among his men, directing their fire and shouting encouragement, Booth was killed by a bullet to the chest. Command then fell to Maj. William Bradford of the 13th Tennessee. Twice the rebels charged the fort and twice they were beaten back. Yet as the hours passed, Confederate sharpshooters took a heavy toll; one by one, the officers and soldiers in the fort fell dead or wounded.

At about 2 p.m., Forrest sent a flag of truce to the fort’s commander with a message demanding surrender. He promised to give the garrison fair treatment as prisoners of war. “Should my demand be refused,” Forrest’s note ended ominously, “I cannot be responsible for the fate of your command.”

It was an old Forrest tactic: convince the enemy to capitulate by threatening them with slaughter. Just weeks earlier, some of his troops had used a similar ultimatum to bluff a superior federal force into surrendering Union City, Tenn. Yet the men in Fort Pillow remained confident. During the truce, black troops taunted their opponents from behind the walls, shouting: “If you want the fort, come and take it!” and “Come on, you dirty rebels!”

The former slaves, Southern Unionists and Confederate deserters who made up the fort’s garrison were understandably reluctant to fall into rebel hands. Earlier in the war, Confederate President Jefferson Davis had publicly promised to execute captured black troops and their officers, while the whites were likely to be branded as traitors and punished harshly. Bradford stalled for time, asking for one hour to consider Forrest’s demand. But Forrest was in no mood for quibbling and gave the garrison 20 minutes. Bradford and his officers resolved to continue resistance. The major sent Forrest a simple reply: “I will not surrender.”

The final phase of the battle was brief and shocking. As soon as 20 minutes passed, a Confederate bugle sounded the charge and the rebels rushed the fort from three directions. The defenders barely had time to respond before their assailants crowded the ditch, helped each other climb the walls, and seized the parapet. The Union troops — their boldness gone — broke and ran for the bluff, with Bradford shouting, “Boys, save yourselves.”

Chaos ensued. With few officers left alive to direct them, some defenders dropped their weapons in surrender, while others scrambled down the steep hillside. But discipline also broke down among the rebels. Forrest’s men had never faced black troops in battle before. In the Confederate mind, opposition from armed black men — in this case, black men who had recently taunted them — was tantamount to a slave insurrection, and few things were likelier to enrage a white Southerner.

“The sight of negro soldiers,” a Confederate witness said, “stirred the bosoms of our soldiers with courageous madness.” Nor was that all: These black men were fighting alongside local white Unionists, whom the rebels despised as “homemade Yankees” and “Tennessee Tories.”

Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The whitte [sic] men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen.

A mass of frightened men, women and children fled to the river, hoping to swim for safety. While some rebels lined the bluff to fire down into them, others pursued them to the water’s edge. A black private named George Shaw had just reached the riverbank when a Confederate stopped him. “Please don’t shoot me,” Shaw said. The rebel replied, “Damn you, you are fighting against your master,” raised his gun, and shot Shaw in the mouth. Among the others, “large numbers ran into the river,” Forrest reported, “and were shot and drowned. … The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards.”

The Northern surgeon Charles Fitch had established a field hospital below the bluff. Now, the doctor watched helplessly as rebels hacked and shot at wounded men. Fitch then saw the Confederates order about 20 surrendering federals into line before knocking them down with a volley. Confederates, their fury unabated, searched the riverbank; whenever they found a Union soldier hiding, they pulled him out and shot him.

“Indiscriminate slaughter,” a Confederate witness called the massacre, but it soon became more discriminating: The attackers kept targeting black troops but began accepting the surrender of white Unionists. (About 69 percent of white Unionists survived, compared to 35 percent of colored troops.) Thirty minutes had passed by the time Forrest and his officers were able to restore discipline and halt the massacre. Several Union witnesses, however, testified that rebels continued to hunt them throughout the night and into the next morning. Confederates, meanwhile, rifled their victims’ pockets, then looted the burning fort and village.

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Forrest had no intention of holding the fort. On the morning of April 13, he arranged a truce with Union naval vessels in the river, agreeing to leave badly wounded federals behind for their navy to recover. The Confederates then gathered up their prisoners and plunder and rode for Mississippi. The black captives — some of whom recognized Forrest as the slave trader who had once sold them in Memphis — would be returned to slavery. The white Unionists were destined for prison camps. Major Bradford, however, would not be among them; Confederates shot and killed him during the forced march, supposedly as he tried to escape.

All told, between 277 and 297 federals — roughly half of the garrison — had been killed or mortally wounded. An additional 61 men survived with wounds. Only a few dozen soldiers and civilians managed to elude death or capture.

By any objective standard, the stunning casualty figures, the small number of black survivors and the accounts of witnesses indicate that Forrest’s men committed a massacre. But the fallout from the incident in the coming weeks and months would demonstrate that objectivity, North and South, was in short supply.

Historians and biographers have long argued over the extent of Forrest’s culpability in the atrocities. It is clear, however, that Forrest himself and many other Confederates initially hailed the massacre as a propaganda victory. “It is hoped,” the general proclaimed in his post-battle report, “that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” Fort Pillow was, in fact, just one of several massacres that Confederates committed against black soldiers that year.

But Forrest was a far better general than a prophet. As Union troops reclaimed the ruined fort on April 14 and tended to the dead and wounded, their eyewitness reports rippled outward, whipping soldiers and civilians into outrage. “There is a great deal of excitement in town in consequence of this affair, especially among our colored troops,” a Union general reported from Memphis. “If this is to be the game of the enemy they will soon learn that it is one at which two can play.” The Union adopted no official policy of retaliation, but black troops frequently went into battle shouting “Remember Fort Pillow!” and showed their enemies little mercy. Rather than cowing black soldiers and the Northern public, the actions of Forrest’s men had only hardened their resolve.

One hundred fifty years later, relatively few physical traces remain of the fort complex or the horror that happened there on April 12, 1864. The site survives as a state park, but tall trees threaten to overwhelm it. The Mississippi, moreover, has shifted two miles west of the bluff where Fort Pillow once overlooked it. Nature has assisted Forrest’s apologists in their efforts to obliterate the truth. Nevertheless, as the place where massacre sparked determination, we should, indeed, remember Fort Pillow.

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